English
Related papers

Related papers: Continuous-time reinforcement learning: ellipticit…

200 papers

This paper concerns the central issues of model robustness and sample efficiency in offline reinforcement learning (RL), which aims to learn to perform decision making from history data without active exploration. Due to uncertainties and…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-01-01 Laixi Shi , Yuejie Chi

Reward shaping has been applied widely to accelerate Reinforcement Learning (RL) agents' training. However, a principled way of designing effective reward shaping functions, especially for complex continuous control problems, remains…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2026-02-12 Mateo Juliani , Mingxuan Li , Elias Bareinboim

We consider the problem of tabular infinite horizon concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) with convex constraints. For this, we propose a model-based learning algorithm that also achieves zero constraint violations. Assuming that…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-11-20 Mridul Agarwal , Qinbo Bai , Vaneet Aggarwal

Theoretical guarantees in reinforcement learning (RL) are known to suffer multiplicative blow-up factors with respect to the misspecification error of function approximation. Yet, the nature of such \emph{approximation factors} --…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-12-18 Philip Amortila , Nan Jiang , Csaba Szepesvári

Continuous-time reinforcement learning (CTRL) provides a principled framework for sequential decision-making in environments where interactions evolve continuously over time. Despite its empirical success, the theoretical understanding of…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-22 Runze Zhao , Yue Yu , Adams Yiyue Zhu , Chen Yang , Dongruo Zhou

Consider a Markov decision process (MDP) that admits a set of state-action features, which can linearly express the process's probabilistic transition model. We propose a parametric Q-learning algorithm that finds an approximate-optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2019-06-07 Lin F. Yang , Mengdi Wang

Despite impressive results, reinforcement learning (RL) suffers from slow convergence and requires a large variety of tuning strategies. In this paper, we investigate the ability of RL algorithms on simple continuous control tasks. We show…

Robotics · Computer Science 2024-02-16 Daniel Layeghi , Steve Tonneau , Michael Mistry

We develop several provably efficient model-free reinforcement learning (RL) algorithms for infinite-horizon average-reward Markov Decision Processes (MDPs). We consider both online setting and the setting with access to a simulator. In the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2023-06-29 Zihan Zhang , Qiaomin Xie

We study continuous-time mean--variance portfolio selection in markets where stock prices are diffusion processes driven by observable factors that are also diffusion processes, yet the coefficients of these processes are unknown. Based on…

Portfolio Management · Quantitative Finance 2026-03-31 Yilie Huang , Yanwei Jia , Xun Yu Zhou

Current approaches to model-based offline reinforcement learning often incorporate uncertainty-based reward penalization to address the distributional shift problem. These approaches, commonly known as pessimistic value iteration, use Monte…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-01-17 Abdullah Akgül , Manuel Haußmann , Melih Kandemir

There has been growing progress on theoretical analyses for provably efficient learning in MDPs with linear function approximation, but much of the existing work has made strong assumptions to enable exploration by conventional exploration…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2020-10-23 Andrea Zanette , Alessandro Lazaric , Mykel J. Kochenderfer , Emma Brunskill

Function approximation has been an indispensable component in modern reinforcement learning algorithms designed to tackle problems with large state spaces in high dimensions. This paper reviews recent results on error analysis for these…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-27 Jihao Long , Jiequn Han

This paper presents a discrete-time option pricing model that is rooted in Reinforcement Learning (RL), and more specifically in the famous Q-Learning method of RL. We construct a risk-adjusted Markov Decision Process for a discrete-time…

Computational Finance · Quantitative Finance 2019-09-04 Igor Halperin

Offline or batch reinforcement learning seeks to learn a near-optimal policy using history data without active exploration of the environment. To counter the insufficient coverage and sample scarcity of many offline datasets, the principle…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2022-06-14 Laixi Shi , Gen Li , Yuting Wei , Yuxin Chen , Yuejie Chi

We consider the problem of reinforcement learning over episodes of a finite-horizon deterministic system and as a solution propose optimistic constraint propagation (OCP), an algorithm designed to synthesize efficient exploration and value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2016-07-08 Zheng Wen , Benjamin Van Roy

This paper presents a pioneering approach to solving the linear quadratic regulation (LQR) and linear quadratic tracking (LQT) problems with constrained inputs using a novel off-policy continuous-time Q-learning framework. The proposed…

Systems and Control · Electrical Eng. & Systems 2025-09-23 Duc Cuong Nguyen , Quang Huy Dao , Phuong Nam Dao

Offline reinforcement learning (RL) faces a significant challenge of distribution shift. Model-free offline RL penalizes the Q value for out-of-distribution (OOD) data or constrains the policy closed to the behavior policy to tackle this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-04-18 Xiao-Yin Liu , Xiao-Hu Zhou , Guotao Li , Hao Li , Mei-Jiang Gui , Tian-Yu Xiang , De-Xing Huang , Zeng-Guang Hou

Recent model-free reinforcement learning algorithms have proposed incorporating learned dynamics models as a source of additional data with the intention of reducing sample complexity. Such methods hold the promise of incorporating imagined…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-02 Vladimir Feinberg , Alvin Wan , Ion Stoica , Michael I. Jordan , Joseph E. Gonzalez , Sergey Levine

We study online learning in episodic finite-horizon Markov decision processes (MDPs) with convex objective functions, known as the concave utility reinforcement learning (CURL) problem. This setting generalizes RL from linear to convex…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-13 Bianca Marin Moreno , Khaled Eldowa , Pierre Gaillard , Margaux Brégère , Nadia Oudjane

Learning a predictive model of the mean return, or value function, plays a critical role in many reinforcement learning algorithms. Distributional reinforcement learning (DRL) has been shown to improve performance by modeling the value…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-08 Ju-Seung Byun , Andrew Perrault